ShortMinds Webcomic

Life happens when you’re busy trying to start a webcomic. Hard to believe that I’ve been at this for nearly three months now. When I started all this there was no formula for starting a comic, no step by step procedure to drive traffic and really no first hand accounts from people currently drawing a webcomic. This is the first installment of what I hope will become a monthly or semi monthly diary of the trials and tribulations of a young software developer, fresh out of college who moonlights as a webcomic artist.

What would drive someone to throw away their free time on something for benefit of others while expecting nothing in return? Well, I got tired of being a moocher. For years I have read comics such as Penny Arcade and Extra Life and never gave anything back besides a few ad clicks here and there. That and it has always been a childhood dream to be a cartoonist. So what better thing to do than start my very own webcomic.

Getting Started

My first step? Google. Needless to say the results were not stellar. Should I try to email one of the established webcomic artists and see how they made it big? I figure the big webcomic artists get flooded with requests on how to start a webcomic, how to turn it into a business and what size font do you use, so why would one of them go out of their way to help me especially when I have always just been a casual reader and never a contributor.

So I set out on my own to traverse the vast expanse of the internet. All alone, leaving my dog and girlfriend sadly neglected while I chase this dream. What would I need first? Characters! Searching the depths of my mind I ventured all the way back to middle school, when I first drew the character known today as Ted. His name used to be Nate, but I figured naming a character after yourself and basing his personality on yourself was absurd, it had to be one or the other. Over the next week or two I sketched Ted and many other characters out trying to get them right. The characters grew and their funny little personality quirks would have me smirking on the inside as I drew. Eventually, I had developed my play list of about 15 characters, of which I think I have used 4 so far. Seems I am stuck on the main character, what can I say, he gets me.

Website

What the crap? All the good website names are taken and most aren’t even being used? It’s almost as if someone went to the moon and left a little flag proclaiming dibs and never did anything with the moon, but was willing to sell the moon at insane prices to someone who wanted it even though the original moon lander obtained the moon for free! Assuming someone actually went to the moon. So, www.shortminds.com it is; it kinda relates to what I’m going for. All my characters are extremely short, most of them are young and have impressionable minds, so yeah, lets go with that.

Now I need some webspace. I’ve used PowWeb in the past on someone’s recommendation and found it slow and unreliable. So I shopped around. I looked at Host Gator on the recomendation from the podcast Comics Coast to Coast that I listen to. The plans were reasonable, but they lacked the one thing I had to have. JSP support so I could use the jQuery library that we are starting to use at work. You might not be able to tell from this site, but I do UI design at work. Why does the top banner look like crap? I made it in gimp before I bought my Wacom Tablet and before I found my old copy of Photoshop and long before I got a new version of Photoshop, considering I haven’t gotten the CS3 version. But, I digress. Eventually I came across Site5 on the recommendation of my college. They offered the best bandwidth, at the best price, with the JSP support I wanted and have been more than fast enough to server everything so far.

To CMS or Not to CMS

Just google CMS for a definition if needed. I looked at b2evolution, wordpress, and a few others and even installed and played with some of them. They just took to much control away from me my my liking. All I wanted was something that would handle the back end database stuff and output just content into the middle of my already pre-formatted page. I found that each style or theme came wrapped up with a full page and to strip away all the fluff and just get the bare content was a chore and once I got to that point to try to just call that content from another page not within the CMS folder made for some fun broken links. Perhaps someday I’ll go back to some sort of CMS. I imagine that the solution I wrote isn’t too secure.

The site came from a weeks worth of work 1-2 hours a night. Remembering and writing my own database calls and protections, I hope. Using PHP and MySQL to dynamically serve up the pages and jQuery to add a little pizazz here and there for those who don’t have javascript disabled. Crappy header image previously explained. I added a form for community activity, of which I have all the posts, maybe I need to post more to get folks involved or maybe it is just too early in the life of the comic to have a form considering my daily readership.

The Blogg

So far I have just kept the blog up to date with news stories that I find interesting and random apologies for when I am late with a comic. I’m pretty sure this is the first post that will break that mold and will hopefully be a recurring event.

The Comic Evolution

Only 30 comics in and already they have changed so much since the first one. The very first comic I drew it, scanned its in and then inked painstakingly using the gimp line tool. Needless to say that didn’t work too well. So, for the second one I drew the comic, inked it and then scanned it in and it still wasn’t looking all that great. So, I shelled out the $300 for a tablet. Comic #3 was the first use of the tablet, a little rough but a big improvement. Since then I have established a common comic size and feel. I’m still not completely satisfied with the current state of the comic, see the future section for more.

Work & Deadlines

Generally I do the comic the night before I post it. They don’t take too long to complete right now except for when I don’t have an idea when I sit down with the piece of paper. With work recently it has been hard finding time to do the comic. Spent quite a few nights working late and stayed up till 5:30 in the morning the other night in order to get a fair amount of work done before our Oct 31st code complete deadline. If you haven’t noticed I missed posting a comic on Friday and that’s because I was up so late the night before and couldn’t stay awake to do a comic Friday night.

Buying A House

In addition to work I’ve been in the process of buying my first house. Getting all the inspections and what not done has been chewing away at my free time as well and is one of the reasons I’ve had to work late recently since I take off hours during workdays to get things done with the house. Soon I will be moving and may be without internet for a couple painstaking days. But, hopefully I can get a few comics ahead next weekend so that moving doesn’t affect my ability to make comics.

Driving Traffic and Stats

Primarily traffic to the site has been driven by online comic listings such as onlinecomics.net, belfry (which I never even listed my comic on it just somehow got picked up, thank you to whoever did that), and the webcomic list. I’ve done a few other things to try to get traffic. I have a page on comixpedia, but as far as i can tell has driven no links. I had a page on wikipedia for about 2 days that got me about 10 clicks before it got deleted. I’ve tried to add it a few more times and it keeps getting deleted for having no assertion of worth, notice I’m not linking to those schmucks. I’ve added the comic to the huge list of other webomics that have requested to have a page created for them. I’m not holding my breath, if a webcomic such as Extra Life can’t get a page on wikipedia how can mine at this point? I’ve posted a few things to Digg, and got maybe 10 total clicks, I plan on posting this article there too, maybe some people will be interested, maybe not. Pinged Technorati a few times and got one click off of that so far.

By far the best traffic drivers have been the webcomic listings and for that they have my gratitude. If I could do it all again i would have waited a month or two before posting to the listings. One of the first things I do when i find a new webcomic is flip through the archive and a couple months ago i had no archive, and I can’t help but think that has caused a few people not to come back. When you first post your comic to a listing it will get a lot of hits because it will be at the top of the new comics section. After that it will drop off substantially so just hope you got a few bookmarks when your link was at its prime.

So with all this traffic talk what are the numbers? Most people keep their numbers a closely guarded secret. Information only given out to attract advertisers, maybe someday I will be like that, but the comic has not grown to that point, yet, hopefully. My first month I had 215 unique visitors, second month 451 and as of yesterday at noon 263 unique hits this month. This month averaging about 17 visitors per day. The number of hits is down this month but the bandwidth usage has been the same. I write off the drop in hits to my links on the webcomic listings falling off the new comics list. But, people seem to be coming back so it’s definitely not all bad.

The Future

I want to spruce up the site a bit. I still haven’t tossed out the idea of one day using wordpress, but for now this is working. The first thing that has to change is the top banner and possibly the logo. I may just spruce up the logo a bit or I may redo it completely. I can’t help but feel that the comic is lacking something that other webcomics have, what is it, ohh yeah, color. I have been planning to create some desktop wallpapers for some time now and posting them in the media section. They will be my first stab really at adding color to the character so I’ll see how that goes and perhaps after the mad rush of projects at work is over and I get moved into the new house the comic will gain some color. I plan on creating and posting my own content to the blog more often while still posting links I find interesting. I have what I think are a few good blog posts to come, so stay tuned for that.

This post will hopefully help someone down the line know just what it is like getting started with a webcomic. It’s not easy and it takes a lot to keep going when you don’t hit it big right away. But, if you ask most webcomics that that been around a few years, most will tell you that it took years to get to the point they are at now. Hopefully someday I will be saying the same thing, but for now I would like to thank the 17 visitors I have every day, and should this post drive you to create your own webcomic drop me a line and I will be happy to spill my guts to ya.

-Nathan